skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks extremely useful assuming it works. Although I never use the emulator while building Android because it basically does not work on most machines and does not give you any real indication how your code will run on an actual device.

Very curious how they pulled this off.
I imagine they have a higher density of virtual machines per host meaning that you're competing / sharing physical resources with many more people.
A friend and I built the whole eBay + Pinterest mashup earlier this year (http://rumma.ge). We were trying to solve the "browsing" problem that eBay has. Basically, if you have a specific product you're searching for, the traditional search interface did an OK job. But if you're just browsing through "vintage transistor radios" or art or any visual category, it was difficult to browse.

These new changes are great because one of eBay's long-hidden assets is it's product images. It hosts more unique product photos than pretty much any other company out there and for a long time, it surfaced those product images as 140px x 140px thumbnails. Focusing on showing larger, higher-quality images is going to be a big win for users.

That being said, I don't have much confidence in their feed setup. eBay is trying to create an entirely new browsing behavior and while it will definitely result in new sales (how could it not over the old homepage?), the mashup up of a users varied interests into one feed is incredibly disorienting. I just loaded up a couple of interests (biking, guitars, and baseball) and I'm seeing a hodgepodge of handbar grips, random baseball cards, and really nice Les Pauls. While the format seems nice, the content isn't really there yet--and the content, i.e. the quality and relevancy of listings surfaced isn't going to be carried by the format alone.
Sorry, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but in case it helps to clarify: Stripe Connect is for sellers, not buyers.
Agreed but the fact that they acquired Svpply means they were working on this and wanted to use Svvply's team to build upon this.
Truth. It's a Posterous blog, so I guess we are a little late it switching off them. Here's another cached version that's a little easier to read:

http://embed.ly/docs/explore/article?url=blog.embed.ly/embed...
Unable to order it (even after creating an account). When manually removing the disabled="" attribute, the next page says "Oops, there's a problem...

out of stock
We are currently out of stock on this item so orders for it have been suspended until more stock is available. For furthur information, please contact us.
"
Quantum theory is already nonlocal.
From the gizmodo.com article: Taiwan's secret radar, which was supplied by Raytheon, was probably on China's metaphorical radar already

"Probably"? I bet that the People's Republic knows the location at least as well as the Taiwanese government, and I bet there's a treaty obligation to tell. That was true of USA/USSR relationship during the cold war. "Secret" missile silos were only secret from the ordinary citizens of the respective countries. The military establishments knew locations of the other's missiles.

So, why keep it secret from their own citizens? Given that statistically speaking, there's very few real national security secrets, keeping secrets from citizens probably just enables fraud, waste, corruption and cover-ups at biblical scale.
My computing setup is the same in spirit as the one described in the article. In my experience, the maintenance overhead is quite small and syncing is a non-issue with a nix tool called unison. It's basically a bi-directional rsync.

Keeping my working directories in sync is as simple as running unison each time I boot my netbook only. This assumes that you have an internet accessible nix machine already in place for other purposes. Understandably, that may not always be the case.
This is interesting. If you could map out preferred directions in the universe (even if those directions changed across space), you would be able to establish an absolute, universal reference frame. That would be...incredible.
"You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's turtles all the way down!"
and... if debugging live code on production machines at 3am is the norm, you've got much bigger problems than table prefixes.
Ah, gotcha - I misunderstood what you meant there.

I've seen the current state of the SDK and API, and while I understand porting to a new kernel was probably a lot of work for them, it makes even less sense considering that most of the WinRT APIs available in Win8 are not there in WP8 - it leaves me wondering what, exactly, they hoped to gain; so far it doesn't seem like a win for developers, and you can't write a full-featured native app for WP8. Maybe you'll be able to for WP9 (if the platform survives that long).
Doping agency claims 'overwhelming' proof of cheating by cyclist Lance Armstrong
Unless you use the two computers for different tasks; then there's no syncing.
Test any browser, from your browser
You state that the image model is good for a single programmer, but not large teams.

How much of this do you feel is due to the lack of tools (VCS, IDEs, etc) equipped to deal with the image model, and how much is inherent to the models?
Ask HN: Songs about entrepreneurship / working hard?
I love songs about entrepreneurship and/or working hard. A few examples:

Big Brother by Kanye West

Can't Knock the Hustle; Coming of Age; and Bring it On by Jay Z

Work by Gang Starr

I need a dollar by Aloe Blacc (theme song of How to Make it in America)

The entire soundtrack to The Social Network

--

Any other suggestions?
I did not express myself correctly. You are right eBay is still famous, but a lot more than what it used to be. Years ago if you wanted to buy something from the Internet you would buy it from eBay, instead now a lot of shops have websites where you can buy things and there is also Amazon that is growing bigger every day. Or at least this was the situation in Italy.
Bullfrog Power Brings Renewable Energy to Canadians
PGP creator's Silent Circle builds a fortress around your smart phone
The collection of names that you set up for "relations" (in the Codd sense) in a schema is the primary "surface" of that schema. Whether they are tables, views, or synoynms to those (i.e. Oracle), each of these names presents the same interface - a collection of rows. Prefixing or suffixing these names detracts from the perspective of the database as a collection of relations, it gets in the way and makes it more difficult to make names interchangeable. The "tbl" prefix is a defensive decision that is unnecessary and detracts from the notion of the schema as a collection of relations.

It is more common to have qualification for objects that aren't collections of rows, like sequences, constraints, and indexes. These are qualifications like "fk_", "pk_", "uniq_", etc. and they serve the purpose of being able to distinguish between "relations", which are the primary API of the database, and "supporting" constructs. These names need to be distinguished from table names as well as from each other and with the exception of sequences are also not present in SQL statements, only DDL.

Consider why none of the other names in relational databases are prefixed as to their type. We all use functions like "current_timestamp", "count", keywords like "CAST", fixed system tables and views like "pg_catalog". Why aren't these named "fnCurrentTimestamp", "fnCount", "keywordCAST", "tblPgCatalog" ?
I try to be the guy who interops between the reactionary DBAs and the happy-go-lucky developers--two parties that optimize for different ends.

So most recently, we had an app that started off with direct table access via an ORM. Once the data access paths stabilized somewhat, I started replacing them with stored procedures. Those stored procedures gradually coalesced to form an API. The ORM-like functionality is still there, if need be, but the stored procedures now provide a contract, much like a service.

In retrospect, I'm not sure the ORM was even that useful. Besides encouraging certain bad habits on the consumer side (eg, most instances of lazy loading), its one more level of indirection to grapple with. Why not drop down to the database and write your implementation there? It can be tested right there and then, and directly in terms of the data flow: input -> output.
I used to commute to university on a 24" unicycle. But that was in Germany, not Edinburgh.
That doesn't sound like a bad system to me, but I think I achieve the same clarity by writing my queries in a more explicit way. I always use multi-part identifiers. For instance, I would join "ON user.id = post.user_id".
Ask HN: Best Credit Card Present Merchant/Gateway
Hey all,

I'm working on a system that will accept swiped credit cards. I have done a ton of work with other CNP (Credit Card Not Present) providers in the past, but i'm having a really hard time finding quality Credit Card Present merchant providers. I've contacted several, but they all seem sketchy or have insane rates.

I would really appreciate any recommendations!
Pay Me for the Coding Interview
If you want to read more about the simulation argument, the place to start is Nick Bostrom's page on it: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
They do seem to be looking for those, but as paid employees rather than volunteers.[1] Those roles are probably harder to outsource to the community.

[1] https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/
Not necessarily (if the data exists then this paper would already have referenced it, surely? These are serious scientists at very respectable institutes - the INT at Seattle is highly prestigious). Firstly, you would need to select rays that are very close to the cutoff...the further your distribution slides down the energy axis, the less noticeable your deviation will be. Secondly, you need to orient your distribution geo-spatially, i.e. take into account the Earth's position throughout the measurement. Thirdly, you need to find a way of correcting for all known sources of very high energy cosmic ray background.

I'm not sure whether anyone has ever done all that at once. I'm not saying that they haven't; I'm just not familiar with any measurement that meets all those criteria. I'm not a cosmic physicist though, so it's entirely possible the measurement has been done.
I never really understood why the speed of light was the limit. If you double your speed, you just halve the time it takes you to get there. Now if you have reached the speed of light, doubling the speed will never make you go back in time, it will just halve the time it takes you yet again. So now one lightyear at the speed of light will take 6 months at twice the speed of light. The energy requirement for going faster than light is another matter.
my b, didn't see it.
Gamification Research: How FarmVille uses Game Mechanics to become Winning
I've waited a long time to see a tool that does not view my program code in terms of lines of text. Being a Lisp (Common, Scheme, Clojure) programmer, I always felt I'd much rather see a structural diff — what units of code changed, not which lines changed.

I'm so glad this approach is finally coming, and in what style!
Yes. Next?
I keep getting the page with the Android-fail-whale image. No idea what is going on... didn't last long this website.
Can someone explain how does this work?
My impression is that anything you can simulate via a program could just as well be the fundamental laws of physics -- and vice versa.

The idea behind this line of inquiry - which I hope is continued - seems to be assuming that, if we are simulated, then we are simulated using a similar computation model to our own, and using data structures that we would have come up with ourselves. I don't have better suggestions for which model to use, but it's good to keep in mind that even if one model of a simulation fails to match our physics, then there may just as well be another that does match it.
Is there any difference between this and having a real device with the same OS version and screen size?
> sync the data all the time

If you use them for different purposes then what is there really to sync?

Your e-mail is probably already device-independent, Chrome and Firefox provide their own mechanisms for syncing, and putting the "final products" -- edited photos, videos, game saves, docs and repositories -- somewhere online, on a home server, or an external drive will be enough.
Dear Stripe, please come to Europe and take my money.
I think the best design would be to bounce down upon the first number (99.999% of cases) but then allow for the entering of numbers if the user manually clicks back up and enters a number as their name (0.001%).
Tesla Model S vs. BMW M5 Drag Race Video
P/E of 100, stock dived. This should not surprise anyone.

Oracle has 15 P/E, so does Apple. Exxon has around 9 P/E.

For perspective; Amazon has 300 P/E, LinkedIn has 900ish.

With a bit of looking at investing information, you can get a rough sense of what's crazy to invest in for a individual investor looking at a < 1 year horizon. FB sure qualified IMO.
I'm visualizing "lattice" the way latitudes and longitudes delineate Earth into a lattice. Except we live on a 2-sphere, which is the surface of a ball - the 3d projection of a circle.

First, some background. The problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time.

What if the lattice revealed is a 4-sphere or 6-sphere? What would that tell us?

Edit: rewrote to address parent post...
What I'm worried about is MS removing XNA support in WP8.
If you were actually going the speed of light, all travel becomes instantaneous from your reference frame.
Apple Maps discloses location of classified Taiwan military base | Ubergizmo
for now

I'm still waiting for it to stabilize, but I plan to experiment with Rust in my next systems-level project.
SolarCity Files for IPO, Aims to Raise About $200 Million
I'm using a combination of Dropbox and SkyDrive (OneNote!) to synchronize between the three machines which I use daily.

The documents on SkyDrive are also shared with two colleagues.

It works well for everything except the TrueCrypt partition I have. Per-file encryption would be more effective, but I have yet to find a nice tool.
How much of this speculated artifact wouldn't be there if The Great Computer was for example analog, and used polar coordinates to simulate our universe?
Spotting a lattice wouldn't be conclusive by any means, but it would be some evidence for the simulation hypothesis, because it would be more likely in that situation than others. I... don't know how we estimate how much more likely.
If they only had one, it doesn't matter how much it cost them to make, it's worth much much more than $100 dollars to someone. If there were enough supply that it were possible for it to be only $100 then it would have to already be ubiquitous. I agree with jacques_chester that it's an economic distinction.
Who said anything about the image model? This is about doing analysis of the git repo. Not replacing the git repo.
Right, so let's say I run a marketplace for video games and such. Back in the day, we used PayPal MassPay to send payments to our sellers. That required the sellers to have PayPal accounts to sell on our platform, which almost all of them had already. Seems like for Stripe Connect to work, our sellers would have to create Stripe accounts.

My understanding until now was that only developers of websites would have a need for a Stripe account, and if I merely purchased something via CC on a Stripe-enabled website, I did not have a Stripe account. So as a marketplace, I have to encourage/demand that my sellers create an account with a third party that they haven't heard of before.

Given that I would want to use Stripe if I were building Dawdle from scratch again, is there a way to have them create a Stripe account without them knowing they're creating a Stripe account?
The only sortof unique thing about coffee-script is the lack of semi-colons. They just abused the comma operator though.
Please Stripe, hear me: micropayment support.
Riml: Relaxed Vimscript (compiler)
I'm loving the features that Stripe are throwing out (and I'm not even a customer <insert obligatory call to come to Ireland>).

I imagine there's huge scope for using OAuth to open up the data for hosted metrics, dashboards or other analysis tools. That, in turn, should open up the market for such tools. I foresee a nice little ecosystem around Stripe. Well done!
Hmm, which paper? Would you link to the PDF?
Definitely a click bait title. Since all of the WP7 apps will run on WP8, there really is not much risk in releasing the SDK with the phones. I agree that it's not ideal, but I think that they're doing it this way because they want to announce all of the new features at the same time as they release the SDK.
The developers of this are friends of mine so I got to play around with it a little last month.

Though I'm not an Android developer, I can see how useful it would be for testing mobile web sites. You can launch an emulator in many different resolutions and pixel densities to check out your web site/app.

You can also see a video of the product in action at the last MinneDemo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TXiDPlc3Fg
I agree that incentivizing writers is the hard part about your site.

I assume the blog will be monetized with advertising. If so, have you thought about a revenue sharing agreement with your writers based on ad clicks? Sort of like Huffington post, but instead of paying the writers on articles submitted (or nothing at all), you could pay them a piece of the ad revenue they generate. Sites like squidoo.com and newsvine.com follow this model.

The revenue sharing article market appears crowded, but can turn out to be lucrative if you differentiate in some way (like gurufocus).
Same here, and it takes quite a long time to land on that page. I guess the website times out..
omg I love these guys.
It's not actually a true statement to say that "if recursively-simulated universes are possible it becomes vanishingly unlikely that we do not live in one."

Yes, I've read Bostrom's paper[0], but he misses a key point: the number of rational beings in each simulated universe may decrease exponentially. If, on average over all universes, each rational being simulates only 0.5 rational beings during his or her lifetime, the total number of simulated rational beings would be exactly equal to the total number of unsimulated rational beings, making it equally plausible that we are in the root universe or one of the simulations.

The possibility that rational beings diminish in number exponentially as universes are simulated seems not only plausible, but likely given the nature of the simulations necessary to replicate our universe in all its detail.

[0] http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
the interesting point to make here is not that the model s is necessarily faster than the M5, but the difference in acceleration between the two. I remember reading about the high incidence of driver caused accidents with the Tesla Roadster when it came out. Electric engines generally have more linear acceleration than traditional engines. The torque is available immediately. This is different than traditional engines, where max torque is available at specific levels. People, not being used to the immediate power, would often panic/lose control and crash. You can see the affect on acceleration in this video, with the Model S taking off faster, and the M5 catching up at the end.
Regarding arstechnica:

John Siracusa's now 11 years on going project of documenting each new release of OSX is awesome. Guess that reading them front to bottom can tell and interesting evolution story and reading them bottom to top can be an efficient method to building missing pieces fast.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2001/04/macos-x/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2001/10/macosx-10-1/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2002/09/macosx-10-2/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/11/macosx-10-3/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2005/04/macosx-10-4/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/
SendGrid — An Event API Introduction
Care to explain how it's relevant ?
I upgraded my system a few months ago with a setup like this. Most of my heavy usage happens in my home office, while on the laptop I primarily write, browse the web, or at the most, SSH into my VPS for some reason or other.

To buy a laptop that matches the desktop system I purchased would have cost nearly twice as much and it would barely be portable. I find desktop computers to have a longer life expectancy. They're more viable to upgrading, and don't take the wear and tear of lugging around a laptop.

For portability I went with a used netbook for under $200. It's more than sufficient for most usage, even if not as fast as a real laptop. My old laptop had a 17" screen and weighed a ton. This I can toss into a shoulder bag, or easily pack into a larger backpack if I'm carrying other things. Its worth is so low that if it happened to be damaged or lost, it wouldn't be catastrophic.

There are so many options for syncing with today's software that it's hardly an issue. Even Chrome keeps the history, bookmarks, and apps in sync between the two.
"if recursively-simulated universes are possible it becomes vanishingly unlikely that we do not live in one"

That depends on the probability of a given universe or simulated universe to contain a simulated universe, and what limits there are with the complexity in space and time on each recursive simulation. I suspect that thermodynamics saves us here.
If you want a fast way to run Android, you can also use a VirtualBox image, it is significantly faster than the emulator in the SDK:

http://www.buildroid.org/blog/
I actually like eBay, and use it pretty frequently. It's a great place to buy cheap stuff made in Asia, such as cheap bike parts and cheap electronics. I guess the problem with that is the profits on cheap items are much lower than on higher-priced collectibles. So eBay is attempting to return to their roots with a redesign...
CourseTalk - Student Reviews for MOOCs (Udacity, Coursera, edX)
Why You Don't Use Your iPad as Often as You'd Like
While I was at school I used dropbox to sync all my course materials, notes, papers etc between my home desktop and my laptop. It worked really well and I never had trouble with it. I mostly did it because, at home, I preferred working with the larger screen and more comfortable keyboard that I had with my desktop.

When working collaboratively with small teams and shared folders it was more problematic, dealing with all the different document files that got created when there were conflicts was problematic. We ended up just going with Google docs for collaborative papers.
My uncle got an Apple the small all-in-one type with the small screen whatever model that was.

I should say I got an ATARI 600XL but that wasn't until about 1984 it was probably on sale.

Not bad though I wrote out BASIC code from Family Computing magazine but had a hard time getting it to work so many syntax errors I couldn't find.
What if organization and execution were the same thing?
My reason for prefixing: makes it possible to use a table called Order (plus prefixing, naturally). Orders are a quite common thing to have in databases.
Looks neat! I wonder how hard it is to lift, and whether my laptop cables and things would end up jamming in all the moving parts.
Hey, let me know what you guys think about the language, if you have any ideas for improvement, sarcastic and derisive remarks, if you want to contribute (!!), etc...

Thanks!
It was a political science class, so you're probably right; but how exactly does it apply?